He told her, “I was asking Abby about Grandmother. About her time down there in North Carolina. Not about when she went back there but before. Before she met Grandfather. Abby just waved me off.”

Pru was bent after apples. She grunted, a sound of disdain. Her fingers worked through the grass, cupping one, two, three apples.

Foster went on. “Seems like, whatever happened when she went back down there, the key to it all had to be from the time before. What was the name of those people there?”

She straightened up, studying him. A breeze off the ridgeline ran over them, a freshet of air, tugging the short grass back and forth. She said, “Except for how she came to leave there she never talked about those times. Not even so much with Father, not that he ever told us. Not any stories that would explain anything to anybody. After she died Father talked some about traveling there to try to learn what he could.”

“Why’d he not?”

She looked at him a long time. Then asked, “Why’d you not stay over there to the White Mountains? Try to unravel what might or might not have happened to your father?”

Because I was scared to, he thought. And said, “Because it wouldn’t have changed anything.”

She nodded. “That’s right. Mother would still have been dead.” She paused and then added, “Perhaps some part of him was afraid to go, also. Afraid of what he might find. When he was old, the last year or two, and not so spry as he’d been and his mind would slip around with him, times then he’d talk about it. How he should’ve done something, gone down there.”

Foster was quiet a time. Then he stepped around her and still wordless bent to the work. Apples into the baskets. They worked until the ground was clean and then Foster hooked the harness ends into the basket handles and slipped the yoke over his bent head, reaching up to settle it across his shoulders. He turned to start down the hill.

She said, “People’s name was Mebane. All I know’s the boy she thought she killed, his name was Alex. Alexander. Mister Lex she called him. Mister!” She spat in the grass.

“Mebane,” he repeated. Then, “Where?”

“Name of the town’s Sweetboro. That’s all I know.”

“It’s a pretty name.”

She started down ahead of him, not waiting. Her voice came muffled with the breeze. “Nothing pretty about it.”

Up in the burying ground under the starlight. Full of pie and boiled beef. A hard freeze coming down. The sky jellied with light. Little sips of whiskey. The old dog pressed against one thigh for warmth, the pup sitting high up on her haunches at the gap in the stone wall, surveying the star-soaked pasture for movement. An owl moaned mournful up on the ridge. Another sip of whiskey. Shaking his head. The owl not mournful at all, just an owl, the voice of night. Sitting with his head resting against one of the stones, some Pelham. He could see both stones of his grandparents. He no longer expected anything magical, any sudden burst of understanding. Because if those old bones told him anything it was that understanding was slow.